


future forward

by followedmystar (neverwhyonlywho)



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Student/Teacher, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-20 08:22:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5998666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neverwhyonlywho/pseuds/followedmystar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Can I write to you?”</p><p>She blurts it out suddenly, on a whim, only wondering whether it’s inappropriate once it’s out of her mouth, but it’s too bloody late – by the time it occurs to her to be mortified, he’s busy smiling her favorite smile, the one that says he’s genuinely touched and a little surprised.</p><p>“Oh, of course,” he says. “I’d love you to write.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	future forward

**Author's Note:**

> Expansion/continuation of [this ficlet](http://followedmystar.tumblr.com/post/62794815633). Thanks to andrastesgrace for the original prompt…more than two years ago. (LIFE, man.) And deep, deep thanks to helplesslynerdy and valueturtle for not only putting up with me but offering multiple rounds of feedback. (The rating will increase to M soon. Soooon.)

Rose’s commencement ceremony is on a hot, humid Friday afternoon in the apex of May.

There’s a lot of waiting involved in the actual event, as it turns out, and she lingers in the shade with Mickey and Shireen for most of it. Her friends gripe about the weather, half-heartedly picking at their commencement gowns in an attempt to cool themselves, but Rose doesn’t feel as put out as they appear; rather, to her this seems like a bizarrely appropriate end to her time in Powell: struggling to move, struggling to breathe. She’s been making her life in this oppressive, unpleasant stagnation for years -- one more day won’t kill her.

Shireen is there next to her, constantly touching her elbow or holding her hand. Mickey stays close too, all bravado and goofy charm and no sadness at all if you didn’t know what to look for. He keeps shading his eyes in the sunlight, and Rose imagines he’s also got a mild wine hangover -- she’d normally tease him about it, but this one is her doing, and she’ll not have him regretting it. Last night was her idea, one late-night B-movie marathon and three best mates and five bottles of wine, cuddled together in a big, slightly inebriated pile on her mum’s couch until they fell asleep. Rose was the last to drop off, desperately fighting the lull of her nth glass; _so_ worth it, though, if only for the way she got to lay still and quiet and cocooned, watching the light from the telly flicker across the sleeping faces of her lifelong friends. She grins again, remembering the way Mickey’s arm around her twitched as he began to dream and how Shireen began to snore quietly against her shoulder. The memory is less than a day old, but she’s already filed it away under ‘all-time favourites,’ a keepsake she hopes she’ll take with her always.

At length, they’re rounded up and ceremonially herded to the commencement grounds, a grassy university quad that, like clockwork, gets buried in rows of folding chairs and smothered in extravagant decor for three days at the end of each term. There are easily a thousand people watching, a fact Rose hopes she can ignore if she fails to make eye contact with any of them.

They’re lucky -- the ushers don’t ask them to sit in alphabetical order, so Shireen loops one arm through Mickey’s and another through Rose’s, straightening her shoulders a little more dramatically than necessary.

“Ready, you lot?”

Rose wants to point out that as far as the registrar is concerned they’ve technically graduated already, that this is pomp and circumstance mostly for the benefit of their parents, but Shireen knows her well enough to give her a playfully stern look in anticipation, so she keeps mum.

Rose borrows a bit of Mickey’s bravado as they shout their answer -- “ _Ready!_ ” -- and they all step forward, together.

The event itself seems to pass in a blur of alternating speeches and applause, and sooner than she thinks, they’re being ushered into a line of perspiring ex-undergraduates and hearing their names called. Mickey ascends first, and she and Shireen shout themselves hoarse for him as he walks -- _Yeah! Mick Mick Mickey!_ \-- and then Shireen’s hands are on her arms, nudging her forward.

“Your number’s up,” Shireen’s voice says in her ear. “Show ‘em some pomp, yeah?”

“I can’t! All I brought was circumstance!” she hisses. As Shireen laughs, Rose hears her name called, and it’s her turn to ascend to the stage in a _swoosh_ of fabric and tassels.

She hears her friends cheer above the applause; she accepts her diploma and grins for the cameras, grins for her friends and her mum out in the crowd, and then she’s sent back into the crowd of graduates through the center aisle. Despite the posh atmosphere, the ceremony doesn’t do much in the way of gravitas, she thinks -- there’s no weight to this, no great significance, and she wonders if she doesn’t feel a bit disappointed. She hopes her mum feels differently.

After they walk, they’re made to sit again, marinating for the rest of the ceremony in a cocktail of humidity and stress hormones. There are more names and there’s more talking, loud music amid louder applause. When the talking is through, people cheer and throw their mortarboards and Shireen is there next to her with a tight hug and a kiss on the cheek. Mickey squeezes her hand, damply but tenderly.

And then -- and then it’s over, and nothing and everything has changed all at once.

***

She’s got a dinner date with her mum and Mickey and Shireen’s family after the ceremony, but there’s one more person she needs to say goodbye to first, and she does it by begging a trip to the loo while everyone else chats with each other and takes group photos in nearly infinite combinations.

She saw him out of the corner of her eye as she was walking down from the stage, so she has a rough idea of where he might be if she hasn’t missed him already. It takes her some time to work her way through the crowd, but she spots him–well, spots his crest of brown hair before she spots the man himself–and sighs, relieved. Would have chased him to his office on the top of the hill to do this, though she’s really not keen on having to explain that long of an absence to her mum.

The Doctor is in conversation with one of her former classmates – he’s gesticulating quickly, apparently describing something, and she watches his hands sweep in wide concentric circles, palms and fingers as expressive as his face has ever been. Her regular class time with him ended some weeks ago, but she still pops by his office at least once a week, and she’s almost got herself convinced she has legitimate reasons for it. She owes him a serious debt of gratitude, and she’s thought for weeks, months maybe, about exactly what to say to him now, but she feels no closer to finding an answer today than she was when she started.

_Thank you for –_

_This has been so –_

_You’ve taught me so much, and I just_ –

Every option feels stale, and she thinks he knows all of it already, anyway.

She’s learned plenty of _facts_ with him, but his classes have fundamentally changed her way of thinking, have opened up entirely new worlds for her – he’s helped not only her education but her growth as a person. This Rose, today, is not the Rose that walked into his classroom on their first day three years ago, and no small part of that is because of him. He should know that, she thinks -- he’s fantastic and she should tell him exactly what he has meant to her, to her life.

(She won’t, of course -- all of that is a bit much -- but the words are there anyway, nudging up from her chest every time she looks at him.)

The Doctor has always treated her with nothing but respect, shopgirl or not. He’s always spoken to her as an equal, not a student; has never suggested she be anything less than extraordinary. More to the point, he’s always believed in her brilliance with such steadfast matter-of-factness that at some point, somehow, she started believing it too. Of course, _of course_ she bloody adores him for it.

He glances up and sees her, polite smile blooming into a wide grin, and the world momentarily drops out from under her.

(She’s _really_ going to miss this -- all this heady, giddy intimidation, and all the joy right along with it.)

He waves her over, and by the time she’s got to him her classmate has shaken his hand and moved on. He turns to her, and before she can even stop to think he’s wrapped her up in a tight, friendly hug.

He is warm and strong and only slightly sweaty, and the embrace lasts longer than she expects but is over too soon. When he steps back to look at her, his smile is all pride and pleasure, and he gives her a happy sigh that she imagines _just might_ border on wistful.

“Rose Tyler,” he says, and she beams at him. “Congratulations!”

“They do say it takes a village,” she says, which somehow doesn’t come out sounding like the ‘thank you’ she wanted it to be. This would be a good time to tell him, there’s a pause that would allow for it and she should speak, she should speak _now_ , but she’s a little dizzy from all this proximity and before she can come up with a way to start, he’s leaning in conspiratorially.

“I’m sorry to see you go, you know.” His voice hushes. “I don’t know if I’ll get the chance to say it after this, so you might as well know -- you’ve really been my best student. Intelligent, remarkable. Brilliant, really. Just thought you’d appreciate the knowledge.” He quirks an eyebrow at her, but it’s sincere: _I mean it_.

“Oh, I hardly believe that,” she counters, partly in modesty and partly because she has no idea how to appropriately respond to that and partly because she’s having difficulty remembering how to breathe. He retreats, stands up straight, and she wishes he hadn’t.

“I mean it. And you’ve got the whole world before you now,” he says, gravely. “Well. You always have, Rose. But now you get to make it yours.”

In laughing she feels the flush of her cheeks, and she’s _really_ blushing now, the tips of her ears burning with it. Three years of classes -- she shouldn’t be surprised to find he’s really got her number, the handsome wanker.

“The whole thing?”

That breaks his mock-stern expression, and he grins, too. “The whole thing.”

“Can I write to you?”

She blurts it out suddenly, on a whim, only wondering whether it’s inappropriate once it’s out of her mouth, but it’s too bloody late – by the time it occurs to her to be mortified, he’s busy smiling her favorite smile, the one that says he’s genuinely touched and a little surprised.

“Oh, of course,” he says. “I’d love you to write.”

“Okay!” It tumbles out of her mouth too fast, but his smile only gentles a bit, letting her off the hook. ( _Bit too enthusiastic, Tyler?_ she chides herself, but is too happy to care.)

“Okay,” he echoes, and the moment hangs, one wordless beat and then another, and then he seems to realize it and rubs the back of his neck, looking bashful.

“Oh, blimey--I’ve got to get back to my mum.” She glances back toward the crowd and back again at him. She doesn’t want to leave, wants to stay here, just here, for about another hour or six, chatting with the Doctor and feeling this sense of breathless...something. But she doesn’t know what else there is to say, and if this pause gets awkward she’s going to want to melt into the floor and disappear.

“Go on, then.” He drops his hand, offers it to her to shake. “And really, congratulations again. Newly minted and freshly employed to boot. Quite an accomplishment! You should be so proud of yourself!”

She opens her mouth to say thanks, but quickly replays the conversation in her head and frowns. “Doctor? I came all the way over here to say thanks, _proper_ thanks, and I’ve already bloody forgotten whether I have.”

The Doctor huffs a laugh, and she files away the memory of that face one more time -- his laugh lines and brown eyes, his freckling and his happy, laddish smile. She’s at no risk for forgetting any of it, but she’s still pleased to have a larger sample size.

“Yeah, you have,” he says. “Now off you pop.”

Rose has been dreading this moment for months. This is supposed to be the last page in a very happy chapter for her -- supposed to be the shedding of some sort of cocoon, a sacrifice of everything familiar for a new and strange and derivative life. She’s supposed to feel the loss keenly, and dimly, she knows she still might. But for now, here she is, grinning at the Doctor with her tongue between her teeth and not feeling morose in the slightest.

It’s a good bridge, she decides -- a warm farewell and a brave hello to a new life, wide open and full of promise.

***

She sends him postcards from Barbados and Antigua, Juneau and Buenos Aires.

On the first one, she scribbles her personal email address at the bottom -- _would love to hear from you too, if you want, but_ _Royal Mail couldn’t keep up with me if it tried! Better to do it this way_ \-- and she tries and fails not to check her inbox more regularly than usual in the weeks following, tries not to feel deflated when there’s no response. He might just want updates, she argues to herself. Maybe he just wants to know what his students get up to in the big, wide world. He probably gets letters from dozens of them. Hundreds. ( _Has he been teaching long enough for that?_ she counters to herself. _If he does this all the time, why the surprise when you asked?_ ).

She could email him too, of course, but that feels pushy, and -- sure, she fancies him a little, but she always has, and she hasn’t yet died of it. Won’t kill her to keep doing it, either, but she shouldn’t act like she does, shouldn’t put him in the position where he has to remind her of her station, or his. (He doesn’t seem like the type -- he seems least the type, if she’s honest with herself -- but if she’s wrong about that she almost doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want to deconstruct what’s already working so well.)

She knows that thinking about this is futile and probably irrelevant, but it doesn’t feel that way when he emails for the first time five weeks after she sends her first postcard. She knows she should read it slowly, go linear about it, but she swallows her propriety whole and skims his message instead, faster than she can possibly read, scrolling down paragraphs (paragraphs!) and catching just a word here, a phrase there -- _didn’t see this! Been on holiday_ and _so pleased to hear from you_ and _what an adventure_ and, inexplicably, _bananas are good_ , which turns her light, wheeling giddiness to actual laughter and only a little disbelief.

There’s no word on how many postcards he’s received -- she’s just sent him the most recent one, her third, about a week ago -- and she thinks about emailing him back, finds the allure of instant gratification almost unbearable. But she dwells on it for an afternoon, reading his email no less than a dozen times (though she’ll only admit to three), and in the end she decides to resist -- this feels terribly real already, making time to find a little shop in each of her contract cities and writing his postcards with her favorite pen over morning coffee or afternoon tea -- and she sort of likes the way she’s simmering on low, making him a part of her life in a pleasant, non-urgent sort of way, letting her save her limited screen time for Skypes and texts with her mum and Shireen and Mickey. This arrangement is distracting, but not overwhelming, and she can’t get too far ahead of herself this way.

This works for several exchanges -- there’s a nice, pleasant equilibrium here -- but there’s more to say to him each time, comments and stories compounding on one another, and by the time she’s in Morocco her postcards become letters.

He tells her stories in his emails: how he is writing that day’s note in a cafe and how the barista has ruined the coffee; how the sun filters in through its stained-glass windows, how the motes of dust move in the light. He tells more important stories too, of his successes and failures as a teacher, of the events happening back home. He intersperses all this with stories about himself, unasked for, but welcome all the same—about his college years, the odd meandering experiences that landed him where he is now, and she replies with the same and after a few months it’s so, so strange how she can feel as if this man sits somewhere in her heart all the time, taking up space and generally being a constant distraction, what with all his offhanded comments:

“ _Do miss you dearly, Rose; looking forward to your triumphant return! (when, again, did you say?)_ ”

or “ _I am sure with your sharp mind you would have this sorted out in a moment—sometimes I do sorely want for your company._ ”

or “ _I am looking for someone to share in a cup of tea that I am arranging, and it’s very difficult to find anyone._ ”

She reads that one over her own morning cuppa and laughs and laughs. She misses him, misses Mickey and Shireen and her mum and her life, but...this freedom is good for her, too, and she’s got no real desire to return home. Still -- still, there are possibilities -- and on a whim, she emails him back, a first.

“Will be in Prague on the tenth of this month; short notice, but a cup of tea could be arranged, if your thirst for adventure is so inclined.”

He answers back in less than a minute.


End file.
